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Photoshop brush randomizer

Ok, so I was wondering about something. With Photoshop having a very nice brush-engine and all, this would be ideal to scatter buildings. Now my main problem is that if I use a brush with high spacing, I end up drawing countless copies of the same building.

Pretty good start, but not entirely what I want. It would be ridiculously awesome to be able to select more than one brush (building), and have photoshop automatically randomize them.

For example: I have a round brush, a triangle brush and a square brush. I select all three of them, and when I draw a line, photoshop acts as though I'm switching brushes while drawing. So I end up with a line consisting of randomly ordered triangles, squares and circles, or in our case, different kind of houses, mountains, trees or whatever. All this while acting as a single brush.

Now I realize this is something very few painters would use, but us cartographers would love this. I've been googling myself to near exhaustion, but I cannot find any way of doing it, and I do conclude that it isn't possible. But wouldn't it be possible for a Photoshop plugin to do this? And if so, do we have people technical enough to make it happen?

People with thoughts about how to do this here? Or people with the technical knowledge to make an awesome brush-randomizer?

Take a look at my brushes in the Elements section. The closest thing that I've ever come up with is in there called the house brush and the thatch brush but you need some paths for it to work (that part is in my town tutorial). It basically takes a square brush tip and sets a size jitter, rotation jitter, roundness jitter, and increased spacing. The roundness jitter makes the square into random rectangles, the rotation jitter makes them all slightly differently aligned to a path, and size (of course) makes em various sizes. For convenience, the brushes and tuts are in my sig.

If the radiance of a thousand suns was to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the Mighty One...I am become Death, the Shatterer of worlds.
-J. Robert Oppenheimer (father of the atom bomb) alluding to The Bhagavad Gita (Chapter 11, Verse 32)

Ascension, I think I know what you're getting at without even reading your tut Problem is that my next project is gong to have somewhat unusual house-shapes. Meaning, custom brush... And custom brushes don't respond well to the settings you mentioned. But thanks anyway.

I'm currently trying GIMP, and while it's awesome that people distribute something like this for free, and I know I shouldn't complain about something like this, but coming from Photoshop, I honestly find GIMP to be highly annoying. I know it's some getting used to. Anyway, after a bit of fiddling, yes, I think I found the holy aperitif-cup... not quite a grail yet, since I can't figure out how to make brushes (image pipes) directional (if at all possible in GIMP). I do have it switching randomly from one building to another, it just paints all of them on the same axis...

I think I'm starting to figure out why Coyotemax calls this a 'holy grail'. I'll keep you all posted on my 'quest for the Holy Grail of map-making'. Tips will be welcomed of course, but I suspect I might need to look further than GIMP and Photoshop.

Painter has or used to have an image hose as well and I think maybe Dogwaffle has something similar? I'm not sure how useful they are because, in addition to dropping randomly sized/positioned/rotated items it seems you'd also want the brush to be "smart" and not overlay the items, have them align in some fashion (along roads or something), etc. and I'm not sure either of those products can manage that bit.

Never messed with macros/scripting in Photoshop but is something possible using that?
M

To be honest, this kind of result is what I'm more or less looking for, and actually something I already managed. However, I'm working on a city/town with each house consisting of several towers, connected by (rope-)bridges. So each 'house' is a tight arrangement of 3 or more separate buildings. Which makes it a wee bit harder